Advice gap remains and professionals need to step up to fill it

The advice gap is one of the most pressing issues facing the advice profession, with numbers at best holding steady and cost-of-living pressures mounting on everyday Australians, those who are outside the top tax brackets are rarely seeking advice.

However, it is those exact pressures that place financial advisers in a unique position to help average Australians. This is a sentiment shared by Rasiah Private Wealth founder and principal adviser Thabojan Rasiah.

“How do we get help to everyone? How do we get help to more people?” Rasiah questioned, adding, “I think as an industry, we care. And so many people are putting so many resources, time, energy, money into trying to solve this.”

For Rasiah, a core element of this is giving everyone the time of day, even if they potentially do not fit the “ideal client” mould.

“One of the philosophies we’ve got internally is that we’ll talk to anyone. We don’t screen them out based on how rich they are or whether they’d be a good client,” he said on the ifa podcast.

“We’re happy to give them half an hour of our time [to see if they do fit us]. But these are all the things that you should be thinking about. This is how you can achieve what you’re trying to achieve.”

Giving an example of a young woman who was motivated to seek advice, Rasiah said that although he wasn’t the right adviser for her, he was still able to refer her to another adviser that was a better fit.

Rasiah also suggested that being charitable could be part of the solution to closing the gap: “We [do] a lot of pro bono work, just like a lot of other advisers, which is another way that we can, as an industry and profession, support those who can’t afford the advice.”

Another core issue, Rasiah added, are regulatory barriers, such as allowing advisers to give advice pro bono to clients outside their licence.

“I think that good financial coaching is underrated. We need to get more people having a good conversation with someone that knows that they’re talking about outside the licence regulations, because it’s not advice. It’s helping people understand what they need to think about and how they need to approach making money decisions.”

Ultimately, he said, “no one’s got it figured out yet, unfortunately, but lots of trying, which is very reassuring”.